‘Lucky Day’ star Crispin Glover plans film and book of his own next year

TORONTO — It seems next year will be a big one for actor Crispin Glover, who plays a psychopathic contract killer in Roger Avary’s new Canadian-shot film “Lucky Day,” in select theatres Friday.

The star of “Back to the Future” and “American Gods” is also an indie filmmaker and author of several artistic books who plans to release two major personal projects next year.

One of them is a film Glover says he’s been developing for over a decade that will star himself and his father, actor Bruce Glover.

In a phone interview this week, the famously eccentric Glover wouldn’t reveal any details about the self-funded film, only saying it’s “a strong arthouse” drama he partially shot on 35mm film stock on his property in the Czech Republic.

It will be his third film as a producer/director after 2005’s “What Is It?” and 2007’s “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine.”

Those two surrealist projects, which Glover distributed himself, are part of a planned trilogy about “corporate constraints that have happened in the last 30, 40 years of filmmaking and (how) anything that can … make an audience generally uncomfortable is necessarily excised,” he said.

The upcoming film is not part of that trilogy, though.

“At the point of release of course I’ll give a title and a lot of details about it, but it was developed for something for my father,” Glover said from Los Angeles, where he also has a home.

“It’s the first time my father and I ever acted together.”

He said he puts most of his thought and time into filmmaking these days, but he makes most of his living from acting, which he’s been doing since childhood.

In “Lucky Day” Glover plays Luc, a suit-clad French hitman seeking to avenge his brother’s death by hunting down a safecracker named Red (Australia’s Luke Bracey) who’s fresh out of prison. Red, meanwhile, is trying to reconnect with his artist-wife (Canadian actress Nina Dobrev).

Avary wrote and directed the gory and darkly comical action-thriller, which was shot in Toronto and Hamilton.

The story shares a similar esthetic as that of “Pulp Fiction,” which won Avary an Oscar along with Quentin Tarantino for best screenplay.

“Roger Avery, talking to him a bit about it, it was apparent that he was actually dealing with serious issues from his own past, and so I think there was an exploration into things that he was dealing with,” said Glover, whose other credits include two “Charlie’s Angels” films.

Glover didn’t comment much on the contents of “Lucky Day,” admitting he hadn’t actually seen the film yet but was planning to watch it for the first time at a premiere screening Friday.

But he did say he enjoyed the dark humour in the film, “very much enjoyed playing the character” and has “always like working in (Canada).”

Glover’s other project set for release next year is a book he said will touch on his issues with “Back to the Future II.”

Glover starred in the original Oscar-nominated 1985 sci-fi hit “Back to the Future” as George McFly, the father of Canadian actor Michael J. Fox’s time-travelling teen character.

But Glover was not in the 1989 sequel and has said in various interviews over the years that he launched a lawsuit that was settled in the ’90s over the use of his likeness in that film without his permission.

Glover refused to talk about “Back to the Future” in this week’s interview, noting he didn’t want it to dominate the conversation like it usually does.

But he did say he’ll reveal more about “Back to the Future” in a book he’s been “working on for a long time” and plans to publish next year.

“What the producers did was of course illegal,” Glover said. “So suffice it to say, there will be elements that I’ll be discussing in the book.”

 

Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press